Fort Lapwai and the Nez Perce Reckoning

Fort Lapwai was established in eighteen sixty-two by the United States Army near the Lapwai Creek in present-day Idaho, on land that the Nimiipuu, or Nez Perce, had long occupied. The fort's purpose was to enforce a treaty that had shrunk the Nez Perce homeland from seven and a half million acres to just over seven hundred fifty thousand. Most Nez Perce leaders had not signed it.

Fifteen years later, in May of eighteen seventy-seven, it was here at Fort Lapwai that General Oliver Howard issued his ultimatum: the non-treaty Nez Perce bands had thirty days to move onto the reduced reservation or face military force. That ultimatum launched the flight of Chief Joseph and roughly seven hundred Nimiipuu on a retreat of well over one thousand miles toward Canada, one of the most extraordinary military episodes in American history. The fort served as Indian Agency headquarters into the twentieth century.